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Edited By Keith Allan and Kasia M. Jaszczolt

This book "fills the unquestionable need for a comprehensive and up-to-date handbook on the fast-developing field of pragmatics" and "includes contributions from many of the principal figures in a wide variety of fields of pragmatic research as well as some up-and-coming pragmatists."

Book Information

This collection of twenty Mali texts was recorded in 2001 and 2002 and weretranscribed and translated by Tonya Stebbins and Julius Tayul. The textsare a representative sample of the materials used as a corpus in thedevelopment of the Mali (Baining) Grammar (Stebbins forthcoming) and Mali(Baining) Dictionary (Stebbins forthcoming).

Mali is a member of the Baining language family, a non-Austronesianlanguage family located in the southwest quadrant of the Gazelle Peninsulain East New Britain , Papua New Guinea . There are around 2,200 speakers ofMali living in eleven villages across Mali territory or in nearby villagesand towns. There are two dialects of Mali : a coastal dialect whosespeakers are called Abilta ‘those from the old village' and a mountaindialect whose speakers are called Arongda ‘those from a cold place'.Language shift to Tok Pisin is well established in the Mali community butchildren with two Mali parents still acquire Mali as their first language.Only the oldest generation of Mali speakers (50 or more years of age) isfully fluent in Mali ; able to use it in all domains without ad hocborrowings from Tok Pisin.

Both dialects, both genders and speakers aged from 30 to 65 years of ageare represented in this collection.